The Steam Deck pushes Linux past a new milestone: 3% of Steam gamers
It’s finally happening! The year of Linux… Portable PC gaming device. (Okay, that doesn’t really roll off the tongue.) According to the latest Steam hardware survey, Linux has just over 3% of the market share of users who have Steam installed. It almost certainly benefited from Valve’s Steam Deck, which derives its SteamOS portable operating system from a Linux base.
It’s not as one-sided as you might think. “SteamOS Holo” is the most popular version of Linux among Steam users, claiming 27.18% of the Linux slice. (This is the latest version of the system on Steam Decks and exactly one other retail device at the time of writing, the Lenovo Legion Go S. Downloads are also available for the original ROG Ally.) This means that approximately 1 in 125 Steam users access the service with a Steam Deck. It probably won’t surprise you that Bazzite, an open source alternative to SteamOS that runs much of the same software plus more desktop tools, is among the closest runners-up.
But there is much more to it. Popular distributions like Arch and Mint hold a large portion of this Linux slice: 10.24% and 9.21% combined, respectively. And nearly one in five Linux users are lumped into the “other” category, using distributions with too few users to list. Long story short, only about a third of Linux Steam users use a Steam Deck or an alternative that (probably) uses something close to SteamOS and (probably) primarily for gaming.
Overall, Linux gained 0.37 percent of Steam’s total users from September to October, which doesn’t seem very significant… until you notice that the combined versions of Windows lost 0.56 percent. Add in a 0.2% gain for macOS and it looks like Windows is giving a small but notable share of its users to alternatives – and most importantly, Linux is winning them over. faster than Mac. It’s worth pointing out here that the majority of PC games now run on Linux, either natively or through a compatibility layer like Valve’s Proton.
Many factors determine this data. Clearly, Windows 10 just lost full support and is now down to just security updates after Microsoft spent the last year begging people to upgrade to Windows 11. And as Steam continues to constantly gain new users all over the world, we can’t say that. everyone who abandoned Windows got a Mac, or a Steam Deck, or installed Linux.
But it’s safe to say that Linux is definitely on the rise, at least among PC gamers. Someone please sell me a gaming laptop with SteamOS preinstalled. It’ll brighten my day.
